


Confringo

by SeeEmRunning



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Depression, Dysphoria, Experimental Style, Gen, Gender Issues, Hermione Granger-centric, Identity Issues, Mental Health Issues, POV Third Person, Present Tense, Self-Hatred, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-26
Updated: 2017-02-26
Packaged: 2018-09-27 02:37:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,686
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9946472
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SeeEmRunning/pseuds/SeeEmRunning
Summary: Hermione hates her body.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This is NOT a happy story. It is, however, how I work through some of my own issues.

Hermione steps into the shower and lets the water beat away all the blood and mud and filth. After nearly half an hour, she reaches for the shampoo. After another twenty minutes, she picks up her body wash. When she finally steps out of the shower, she catches sight of herself in the mirror (it never fogs, some spell cast on it in the 14th century - _Noncaligo_ , maybe, she’ll have to reread that chapter in _Hogwarts, A History_ before she forgets).

Anger and hatred fill her. She hates her body, wants to grab her breasts and physically tear them off, wants to see the blood splatter on the sink and feel the weight of the bloody sacks of fat in her hands. She wants to take the fat and pad it around her waist, get rid of the hourglass and make herself into a stick. Cut off her hair. Square her jaw. She swallows just to see her neck move, because for a moment - but only a moment - she can imagine an Adam’s apple where it should be.

She blinks. The bathroom is clean. She’s looking steadily into her own, decidedly feminine face. She grabs a towel and wraps herself up, masking her body from view.  
***  
Her robes are all a size or two too big. None of them have been tailored to fit - she’d convinced her parents that it was a waste of money that could be spent on _useful_ things like books or potions ingredients. Nearly all of the other students’ robes are tailored, even those of the first-years for whom puberty is a distant nightmare. It’s just one more thing that sets her apart.

At her Muggle primary school, they’d had uniforms. Hermione had hated the skirts, and every day they’d somehow been ruined beyond repair. Miraculously, when the school began allowing her to wear the trousers, she didn’t destroy a single uniform. When she’d learned she had magic, things had clicked into place.

Hermione really hates skirts. And dresses. And makeup. And long hair.  
***  
She tries. She really, truly does. She tries to be the girl her parents expect her to be. She tries to make them proud. She tries to make her teachers proud. 

And for a while, she succeeds. She smiles and laughs at the right times. She dates Viktor Krum in fourth year, and when he leaves she takes up with Terry Boot. That disastrous relationship lasts all of two weeks before they can’t stand each other anymore. They’re broken up before September of their first year is finished.

Ron tries to hide his happiness in the face of Hermione’s supposed upset. He’s not a very good actor, but she pretends to not notice. She pretends a lot that year - pretends that there isn’t something scratching under her skin trying to get out, pretends that when the scratching goes away there’s something in her sternum besides a horrible hollow feeling, pretends to be unaffected by Umbridge’s reign of terror. She pretends and pretends and pretends until she’s forgotten what it’s like to be genuine.  
***  
She gets a lot of detentions that year.

She hasn’t gotten many. There was the dragon-smuggling incident in first year, but since then she’s kept her nose clean. She can’t miss the glimmer of surprise in her teachers’ faces when she starts talking back to them with a viciousness that surprises even herself. She gets detention after detention, and when Umbridge decrees that she now has supreme authority over all punishments, Hermione’s hand is bleeding more than it isn’t.

She doesn’t care. There’s a certain amount of - not satisfaction, no, maybe _relief_ that comes with the ache of overworked muscles and the burn of accidentally slicing her finger when she prepares potions ingredients. There’s a swelling of near joy when she doesn’t dilute the solvents before she begins scrubbing floors or toilets or doorknobs and her hands burn. There’s a snarling beast in her chest that roars in triumph whenever Umbridge has her write _I must respect authority_ in Hermione’s own blood.

Over the Christmas break, she returns to Grimmauld Place. She serves no detention. She is not injured. By the time she returns to Hogwarts, she’s snapping over nothing. Her first day back, before term officially begins, she borrows a niffler from Hagrid and makes sure Umbridge sees her put it in her office.  
***  
The DA makes Harry and Ron happy. It drives Hermione up the wall.

It’s bright and loud and as important as it is, she can’t really bring herself to care. Everyone dies eventually. Everyone suffers needlessly. So what if the Death Eaters hasten it for all but a select few?

But she can’t bear to see Harry hurt. She can’t imagine a life without her two friends by her side - hell, she can’t imagine life at all anymore, the future just a vague question mark - and so she works hard and creates a curriculum. She keeps the more brutal spells to herself, not trusting their entire group, and sneaks into the Restricted Section at night to add more and more gruesome curses to her repertoire. The weightlessness she feels when she’s too tired to function is the closest to happy she ever gets, and she stays awake as long as she can to reach that state. Her classwork suffers for it, but for the first time in her life, she couldn’t care less.  
***  
The fight in the Department of Mysteries is the first time Hermione can properly breathe in a long, long time. She throws curses at Death Eaters and blocks the ones coming towards her. Ron is attacked by brains - _literal brains floating in a vat_. Neville’s nose is broken when a planet explodes. Ginny’s caught by a jinx and goes tumbling down the stairs, breaking her ankle. Hermione keeps fighting, putting the spells she’d learned in the Restricted Section to good use. Bellatrix Lestrange sends Sirius flying through the veiled archway and Hermione, fueled by rage and grief, casts a spell that breaks every bone in Lestrange's body.  
***  
When the war is done and over with, Hermione receives the Order of Merlin, First Class. She is poked and prodded and stared at. The _Daily Prophet_ writes articles on who she’s supposedly sleeping with. She attends meetings with Kingsley Shacklebolt, the new Minister of Magic, to help him decide how to govern Britain (she honestly doesn’t know why she’s included, she hasn’t even finished school yet). 

When she’s not at the Ministry or helping Ron and Harry move into their new flat, she’s at Hogwarts, repairing the damage done by friend and foe alike. She learns more of wards and protective spells than she knew existed. She and McGonagall negotiate with the centaurs and the acromantulas and the wood nymphs and a pack of wolves who scratch out messages in the dirt and all the other sentient beings in the forest, to help keep all of them safe. She goes to bed every night sore and exhausted.

She receives her Hogwarts letter while she’s eating breakfast in the Great Hall and decides to finish her schooling for lack of anything better to do.

Hagrid finds a body when he brings the first years over the lake by boat, and the Sorting is delayed while the corpse is dealt with and the children are calmed. That’s not the only lost corpse to be found - two weeks into term, a third-year finds a desiccated body in the third-floor corridor where the Sorcerer’s Stone had been hidden so long ago. To her credit, she doesn’t scream, just sends for her Head of House to come help.

After a year on the run, staying in one place takes getting used to. Every time she turns the corner she sees blood and smells rotting flesh - some of the dead were lost in the halls for weeks before they were found. Their new Defense teacher tries to make a surprise entrance, much as the fake Moody had in their fourth year, and is thoroughly hexed before he has one foot in the door.

Classes are no easier. They’ve all spent at least one year fighting to the death; the DA has been fighting for three years. They’re not children, not anymore. Nobody who was previously at Hogwarts, no Muggle-born who spent the past year in Azkaban, can be considered a child.

She takes a knife and scrapes the scars from her arms. She can’t bear to see MUDBLOOD every time she looks down, can’t bear to remember her time in the dungeons of Malfoy Manor. She very nearly dies of blood loss before someone finds her. Her knife is confiscated and the teachers look worried when they don’t think she can see them. Hermione wants to laugh - the point hadn’t been to die, the point had been to make her body hers again.

 _If it ever really was_ , whispers her mind, and she shuts it down reflexively and tries not to look in the mirror.  
***  
She’s twenty-three when the ghosts of her past get to be too frequent. She vanishes, leaving only Harry and Ron a forwarding address. She moves to America, gets a job at a fast-food chain, and attends community college to catch up on all that she missed when she attended Hogwarts instead of secondary school. Once she’s gotten her Associate’s degree, Hermione transfers to a university and works as a receptionist for a dentist’s office. She does well, impressing her professors and her boss. She double-majors in History and Psychology and goes on to get her PhD in counseling, finding new ways to merge Muggle science and magic. Life slowly gets more bearable.

Still, whenever she sees her naked body in the mirror, she wants to dig her nails into her breasts and rip them off. So much has changed - but that hasn’t.  
***  
She’s thirty, working as a researcher in a Muggle hospital with a hidden magical wing, when she can’t take it anymore. She takes the knife she has in her potions kit and hacks off her chest. It takes more than a week for anyone to find her body.


End file.
